Ex-communist Cops Get Fbi's Know-how

February 17, 1997|By Tom Hundley, Tribune Staff Writer.

BUDAPEST, Hungary — McKee Anderson is a Los Angeles actor best remembered as Helen the housewife in the 1990 remake of "Night of the Living Dead." More recently, she has been helping a group of Lithuanian police officers act out their own worst nightmares.

"Try to show a little more vulnerability," she urged the beefy cop who took the role of a rape victim, complete with blond wig and bright red lipstick.

His fellow officers had no trouble with their roles. Playing the duty officers at the police station, they reacted to the victim's predicament with leering skepticism, badgered her with humiliating questions and suggested the whole episode might have been avoided if she hadn't been quite so attractive.

The exercise was part of an eight-week training program conducted by the FBI at the bureau's International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in Budapest.

In the two years since the academy opened its doors, some 300 mid-level officers from more than a dozen former communist countries have come here to learn how police are expected to function in a democracy.

"Law enforcement training has become a real foreign police initiative for us," said Jim Pledger, who was in charge of international training programs at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., when the ILEA was set up.

"The economic situation in these new democracies is suffering because of increasing crime. If the police don't respond, people will lose faith in the system. There's a real chance they would revert back to the systems they had before," said Pledger, who is now retired.

In addition to the role-playing techniques that Anderson specializes in, the academy's curriculum includes nuts-and-bolts lectures on informant management, electronic surveillance and drug raids.

The U.S. Secret Service teaches a course on counterfeiting, and a special segment on fighting organized crime is team-taught by Italian and Russian police agencies.

The program, which costs $2.5 million a year, also opens a few doors for U.S. crime fighters.

"The ILEA is a good way for us to network with law enforcement agencies from the former East bloc. It lays the groundwork for an effective assault on international organized crime," said agent Les Kaciban, who spent eight years in the FBI's Chicago field office before he was dispatched to Budapest to head up the academy project in 1995.

Organized crime has been an unavoidable byproduct of communism's sudden collapse in Central and Eastern Europe.

The most aggressive criminal enterprises first appeared in Russia and several of its former republics. They quickly expanded westward, first to Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia and then into Western Europe.

The Russian "mafia"--in reality, many competing gangs from all over the former Soviet Union--has already established a foothold among immigrant communities in the United States.

"We're seeing these guys leapfrogging from one country to the next," said academy director Kaciban.

Bombings and murders have become common in Budapest as rival Ukrainian gangs try to carve out turf in lucrative protection rackets. Local police admit they are overwhelmed.

Poland is the main collection point for stolen cars in Europe. Thieves working in Western Europe and even North America smuggle their cars across the German border or through the Baltic ports for shipment to points east.

The 50 students currently at the academy are from the three Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--all of which have become major gateways to Western Europe for Russian-based criminal enterprises.

"A new breed of criminal has emerged, much more sophisticated than anything we had ever dealt with before. We were completely unprepared," said Mieczyslaw Goc, who heads Poland's national police training academy.

Few police in Poland or elsewhere in the region had ever used a credit card, much less investigated allegations of credit card fraud. No one was equipped to deal with the myriad of frauds and scams that exploited the fledgling financial systems in these countries.

"In my view, the increase in this kind of economic crime is the most severe problem facing the new democracies," Goc said. "People will lose confidence in the reforms."

The police, meanwhile, had a confidence crisis of their own.

In the old days, they were the privileged bully boys of the regime. Party loyalty, not professionalism, reigned. Corruption was taken as a police prerogative.

The wave of new democratic leaders that came to power at the beginning of the 1990s zealously purged police departments of thugs and party hacks. They rewrote laws to curb police abuses. But in some cases, experts agree, the reforms went too far, leaving police underpaid, demoralized and ill-equipped to handle the unanticipated onslaught of organized crime.